Yes, terrorism. Gay-bashing and hate crimes are useful terms. They're very descriptive, and they have specific meanings. But if you remember the opposition to hate crimes legislation, it's that someone killed in a hate crime is just as dead and that the hate crime enhancements are, well, unnecessary. If we start to make it clear that the violence that is inflicted on gay people or Muslims or religious buildings or innocent people at the hands of a guy with a lot of guns or, for example, Dr. George Tiller, isn't just assault and battery or arson or murder, it's terrorism, MAYBE we can move the needle on the public perception of events.
Before you read the rest of this, surf on over to Chrislove's harrowing diary, Horrifying: "Fag" spray-painted on OK gay man's car, then blown up, and you'll see why I'm writing this now. Follow me below the great orange cartouche, please
Here's the Merriam-Webster definition: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion. Interestingly, when I accessed the Merriam-Webster page today, the first of three trending words was terrorism, although they used a different definition of terrorism that involves groups (which made me wonder who Merriam-Webster was trying to serve). If lookups for "terrorism" spiked the day after the shootings in Aurora, that means we're part of the way there for emphasizing "means of coercion" as what terrorism does.
The problem is threefold. First, an emphasis on the group nature of terrorism (what Merriam-Webster tried to do) allows us to misidentify domestic terrorists as lone wolves, just as we see going on in Aurora right now. Second, "gay-bashing" is very rarely associated with coercion, although the underlying message of gay-bashing is "We don't like your kind and we don't want you around here." Third, "hate crime" is considered the result of (to be gentle) bias or (to be honest) hate-filled bigotry. The hate crime is committed within the person who commits it's mind. Not coercion either. Besides, lists of domestic terrorism generally consist of crimes committed by radicalized Muslims. We need to do some historical investigation here.
The lone wolf (or the three lone wolves) as terrorist(s)
Our poster boy would be Timothy McVeigh (and I've always wondered why the government was in such a hurry to execute him.) NOBODY (well, almost nobody) wanted to describe him as a terrorist. Here's the Washington Post:
The Last Two Years: Fitting Right In With the Far-Right Militants
The right wing TURNED him into a militant, especially after Waco. Here's
Gore Vidal in Vanity Fair:
Grandiose but, I think, in character for those rebels who like to call themselves Patriots and see themselves as similar to the American colonists who separated from England. They are said to number from two to four million, of whom some 400,000 are activists in the militias. Although McVeigh never formally joined any group, for three years he drove all around the country, networking with like-minded gun-lovers and federal-government-haters; he also learned, according to American Terrorist, “that the government was planning a massive raid on gun owners and members of the Patriot community in the spring of 1995.” This was all the trigger that McVeigh needed for what he would do—shuffle the deck, as it were.
Isn't that the way radical Islamists are supposed to be radicalized? Can we acknowledge that the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was a terrorist act? Commentators initially thought Muslims were involved.
One more recent example, and this one DOES make the list of terrorist acts in the United States. From msnbc, January 18, 2011
A backpack found along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. march in Spokane contained a bomb "capable of inflicting multiple casualties," the FBI said Tuesday, describing the case as "domestic terrorism."
Here's
David Neiwert from crooksandliars.com
Well, as Nancy Goldstein points out at The Nation, the national media were pretty reluctant at first to identify Monday's thwarted bombing of the MLK Day parade in Spokane as domestic terrorism -- but not only was I not fooled, neither were the folks in Spokane, particularly not the FBI agents who know the territory.
Finally, here's a link to the
Southern Poverty Law Center's list of domestic terrorist acts since 1995. So we've established what it is.
Gay-bashing as coercion
Let's start with with a really good example of terrorism as coercion: the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who performed abortions in Wichita, Kansas.
Dr. Tiller’s death is the first such killing of an abortion provider in this country since 1998, when Dr. Barnett Slepian was shot by a sniper in his home in the Buffalo area. Dr. Tiller was the fourth doctor in the United States who performed abortions to be killed in such circumstances since 1993, statistics from abortion rights’ groups show.
Although most of the deadly violence occurred in the 1990s, advocates said, abortion clinics and doctors have continued to be the targets of intense, sometimes threatening protests. Some said they feared that Dr. Tiller’s death might signal a return to the earlier level of violence. At some clinics on Sunday, administrators were reviewing their security precautions.
This is quite obviously a terrorist act to warn other doctors not to practice in Wichita or other places where the anti-choice movement might get violent.
Gay-bashing? Most people, like Brett Berk (one of us) in Vanity Fair, look for the cause, and here he lists four: the economy (people need someone to lash out at), the Tea Party (anti gay sentiment to attract "values voters"), the President (see my February diary on Obama and LGBT rights, and Berk is angrier than I am because he's writing in October 2010) and the Overwhelming Prevalence of Anti-Gay Activities (it happens all the time and we have an uptick nowadays). Nobody cares about the gay victim. Let's take this as a given, that people think twice about where they live after an incident. That's what terrorism is supposed to do.
Hate crimes as terrorist acts
Here is the freakin' FBI! I only need to quote the first paragraph here:
Investigating hate crime is the number one priority of our Civil Rights Program. Why? Not only because hate crime has a devastating impact on families and communities, but also because groups that preach hatred and intolerance plant the seeds of terrorism here in our country.
All I have to say after that is
James Byrd, Jr. His experience got Rick Perry to sign a hate crimes act in 2001.
Thus, let's just start calling these homophobic, racist, xenophobic and anthrophobic acts terrorism, and, while we're at it, acknowledging that rape is about power, add terrorism to the terms we use to describe that too.